Articles about Manchester by a miserable old git.

Media world

In the last couple of weeks I’ve been, what I can only describe as harassed by my friends from Manchester. Coming from Merseyside I don’t take too kindly to woolLybacks from the enemy camp telling me what I should or shouldn’t be doing, especially when it comes to comedy.

Everybody knows that Liverpool is, always has been and always will be the epicentre of comedy and comedians on the planet. Don’t you dare disagree,

Anyway, by the time I got my third link on my facebook page I gave in. I went to http://www.burybob.com/ prepared to glance at what they were going on about so I could retaliate with scathing scouse wit and clever put downs.

For a start the site is orange, and I mean really orange…not the best start for a good catholic girl like me…well I went to church until I was 14, but I suppose that was several years ago now(cough).

The front page was full of warnings not to enter unless you had an open mind and had a very silly banner half way down the page which made me chuckle despite my intention to cast aside this upstart from the land of the red devils.

At the top of the page were 15 page buttons yes 15….I picked one at random and came across a slightly gay guy called Terry Bull who began to ramble on about his celebrity charges …was this for real …it certainly looked it….until I listened to what he was saying. That was my fatal mistake. As soon as I began to be taken in by this daemon I began to chuckle again. I bit my tongue…hard…still the chuckling persisted …OMG. He’s even got some kind of wooly back accent …and I’m chuckling.

I quickly clicked another button figuring it was a lucky break on his part and then I came across a guy in army fatigues talking about suicide bombers…not a subject that you would think has a lot of laughs in it…..but again I found myself not only chuckling ,but laughing out loud. This is not material that you can play for the vicar as the language was quite strong, but it fitted the character perfectly, so I stayed and listened to this guy for 5 minutes……and didn’t think…there’s five minutes I’ll never get back,,,No, I actually enjoyed it.

I clicked on button after button and each time found a different character, all of whom were funny,original and likeable. Even the cannibal…yes you heard me…a cannibal. ”Dahma the charmer” was the title of the piece. How could a guy sitting there in bad lighting , with obviously no money being spent on anything. keep me fascinated like this. The answer gradually began to dawn on me.

This guy is talented, clever, edgy and walking the line of pc or not pc like a tightrope walker on a BBC comedy marathon.

”How come this guy isn’t a star ?”I thought. Then it occurred to me that as they hadn’t spent any money on anything. Maybe it was because they didn’t have any.

I registered on the site and got a welcome letter back from a character called uncle Joe which explained something about what was going on here and inviting me to contact him with any ideas of what Bob should be talking about next ..subject-wise.

I wrote to the email given ideas@burybob.com asking for an interview with Bob and got a reply back the next day saying that Bob wasn’t giving any interviews at the moment as he was busy preparing for the release of his first single ”This Beautiful Game”, which is a song about the corporisation of football and working on getting the site right before he started the old self promotion thing, Apparently he is trying to do something in connection with The Princes Trust to help youth teams in the Burnley area and half the proceeds would be going to a youth team from there abouts. The single will be a free download to anyone who registers before April 1st and even then will be by voluntary donation only.

”How are you going to get any money like that ” I thought.

Then I realised…because the guy was likeable and not full of his own ego and you could believe he was just wanting to help regardless of the hard edge to his comedy.

Anyway, to cut a long story short I sent off another email asking to be put on the list for an interview when the time came. I also went back to my facebook page and admitted publicly that the Manky B****stards were right.

Oh, and the song’s pretty good too.

So as the logo on his site says ”Bury Bob, catch him before the authorities do.”..you won’t regret it.

From those distant days of radio, to the flat screens of the present day, Manchester has had more than it’s fare share of comedy giants.

In the mainstream world it was probably one of the most controversial comedians of the seventies and eighties, Bernard Manning. He managed to be totally un PC and get away with it for 30 years…which I suppose is a sad reflection on the society we live in, rather than Bernard’s refusal to be governed by other people’s values. This however does not negate the offense that was generated by what he said on stage and the stere-types that he propagated.

In more recent times comedy seems to have lost it’s ability to be controversial and most of the comedians I see on TV are too middle of the road and happy to have their regular slot on some pre scripted pretend game show. No one seems to be taking chances anymore. Hopefully there is a big upsurge of young talent working the clubs as I write who will prove me wrong in years to come.

I laugh at things I think maybe I shouldn’t be laughing at. From seeing someone really doing a prat fall in the street to hearing a dirty joke that was just a little too explicit. I don’t like knock knock jokes or those ones that the guy in the pub reels off. I enjoy original thought,and people who choose subject matter that is “out of the box” rather than “off the shelf”.

Don’t get me wrong I loved Peter Kay when he first started and think that there is a lot of Mr Kay we haven’t seen yet…but looked at as comic material…his routines are just reworkings of comedians from the 50’s like Al Read or later on Les Dawson and even Mike Harding the ”Do You remember format.” It’s easy to make people laugh using this format, because you know what buttons to press. But, lets face it …it isn’t original.

The backlash in the seventies generated many interesting acts from the likes of Alexi Sale to Jack Deeand eventually Eddie Izzard, who though they had completely different delivery styles, all managed to talk about subjects that other comics didn’t touch on.

As I said earlier this originality seems to be in short supply at the moment as those rebels now ‘are’ the establishment, so they and their clones are the ones that the media shove in our faces. Recently Iâ€™ve noticed a rash of “Family Comedians” who I wish would just go back to the holiday camps they cut their teeth in and stay there.

One comedy writer I have come across on the net is a stream of conscientiousness comedian called Bury Bob. His material is videoed by his side kick who goes under the name of Uncle Joe Bloggs and a whole family history is being built behind the Bob personna .

From what I understand Bury Bob is an ex ..you name it he’s abused it…olic and also schizophrenic…..not a great combination you might think….but art comes out of suffering and this guy has certainly paid his dues by the sound of it.

The premise is that the many characters that have been arriving on his website over the last few months are all merely different facets of his schizoid personality.

I was genuinely shocked at times by some of the things he says, but by the end of each piece I found myself questioning why I was shocked.

The subject matter ranges from the ramblings of Bury Bob himself…current subject his army days…

“I was in Helmand province for three years and never saw a jar of mayonnaise”……to Kenny the Cannibalâ€™s recipe page.

His other characters currently on show include Terry Bull ,confident and personal life coach to the Q list celebs that fill our photo press.

Psycho Bob is another member of his collection of personal daemons and is a ‘sit down’ comedian who takes ten minutes to tell a one line jjoke…a sort of extremely stoned Ronnie Corbet.

One of my favourites is DJBNB , a hospital radio DJ who perhaps doesn’t have the right amount of empathy for the job.

The site is very entertaining not just for the video content but for the text and visual gags that are placed on every page.

There is even some music and a YourTube page where you can send the weird stuff you find on the net. There’s also a free download page that you get access to when you register, where you can download the songs for free as well as some things by other artists including the very talented and very beautiful “Nymphet”. I don’t know how they know her.

Behind it all there is a strong moral message usually saying exactly the opposite of what the words portray.

The really amazing thing is that everything you see was shot live without rehearsal or script. There are some cuts in the videos and I emailed Bob to ask what was in these….I got a reply from Uncle Joe who appears to be the arbitrator and spokesman. He told me that usually Bob needed a break at that point or said something in the flow that they later thought was too offensive or to cheap a laugh or they had just cracked up themselves.

Bob’s heroes are legion…a bit like his daemons….and include Ross Noble, Bill Hicks, George Carlin,John Cooper Clarke as well as the greats that were around while he was growing up like Morcambe and Wise and Tommy Cooper. He’s certainly no comedy snob.

So if you are looking for something fresh, funny,truly alternative and intellectually stimulating all at the same time get over to Bury Bob’s site but leave your preconceptions and your own prejudices at the door….

When I was young people judged how ‘long in the tooth’ they were getting, by measuring themselves against how young policemen looked.

These days you don’t see many policemen on the beat so I’ve started using a different criteria….

stand up comedians.

I don’t remember in the early days of alternative comedy anybody talking about their mother, other than in how she had been a suffocating influence in their lives.

The other night I was watching some guy…don’t ask me his name they all look the same to me….and he was talking about how his mum was having trouble with understanding a computer….really radical I thought and switched off.

One of the few shining lights in the darkness is Lee Nelson who shows us how to work a crowd, be cheeky, get a couple of subliminal messages across and leave. A real pro who has obviously paid his dues in lots of different venues and appeals to all ages and races apparently.

Unfortunately, the rest of the comedy scene in the UK seems to be bereft of original talent.

Soon Manchester youtube funny man Bury Bob will be taking his internet comedy into the live comedy club environment. He has been working hard on the act trying to find an mood that is both original and approachable. Expect to see him out there in the Manchester comedy clubs in September 2011.

>Last month I wrote a witty one-liner; it referenced a high profile news story at the time and was unique. I told a couple of my friends who thought it was really funny, so I posted it on Twitter. 4 days later, whilst watching a very popular comedy news programme on mainstream television, I saw my joke being repeated verbatim by a well known comedian.
Was I seething? Was I flying to my laptop to track down this disgraceful rapscallions’ website so I could harangue him mercilessly? Was I contacting my shady friends from the local underworld so they could go around, have a quiet word & get my joke back for me? Erm, no.
I sat for a moment, sipped my tea gently, like a guru from the Orient (not Leyton) with all the mystical calm that comes with deep understanding, and smiled to myself. In my mind, I was certain of something. Whether or not my original joke had been ‘utilized’ (plagiarised is such an accusatory and tasteless word) or the comedian in question had merely arrived at the same cerebral place as I independently, it meant that the humour that was emitting from my weird and sometimes wonderful, sometimes ‘blunderful’ brain was deemed fit for the masses.
With the advent of the internet, digital time stamping, intellectual property and the like, many people have become more than a little obsessed with who wrote what first. As if it was a crime for somebody to come up with the same idea at a later date. I pride myself on trying to be original, surreal, fresh & inventive when it comes to writing comedy. Jokes – especially one-liners – have been something I decided to try my hand at recently. I penned over 250 jokes in 2 months on a famous website, only to find that 15 were deemed duplicates that had previously appeared there. The tenet ‘great minds think alike’ or ‘idiocy loves company’ sprang to my surprised mind.
I remember the furore over Bill Hicks’ material being ripped off by Dennis Leary, who has gone on to make a very successful career. Hicks is remembered fondly for his originality and style, and yes, it appears Leary copied a good part of his act for a while. Hicks died 17 years ago, Leary is now a popular movie figure, seemingly continuing to be successful after his main source of material had passed on. I reserve judgement, but it portrays a strange change in the lifespan of a joke.
When I was a teenager in the early 1980s, all jokes were heard in the playground, the pub, at the match or in the young offenders unit. You heard a good one, you passed it on. Many originated in the comedy club scene: Bernard Manning, Chubby Brown, Jimmy Jones etc. or from television, Ben Elton, Eddie Murphy, Richard Pryor, Dave Allen etc. People relayed them to share the humour, to have a common ground, a point of reference, or just to give the lads a good laugh in the vault on a Saturday night. Nowadays it appears to be about separatism, ownership, a competitive need to be the first to get the text joke out to all your mates.
Humour has become competitive. Stand ups like Gary Delaney are accused of stealing from websites; he is counter-accusing website users of stealing his material. Did a joke originate with Tim Vine? Or was it one of Tommy Cooper’s? Does it really matter? We’ve reluctantly put the ‘fun’ in dysfunctional – it’s only a small observation of society’s changing ways, but it definitely highlights the way technology has increased paranoia & selfishness in the 21st century. As the baby goat said to me, “I kid, you not”.

Manchester is the capital of English football. It’s official! Throphies and titles abound. The backslapping begins in the board rooms as they justify the mind boggling sums of money they spend and vie eachother for a bigger piece of the pie.

Nostalga cannot help but raise it’s head reminding us of former glory days. The days when hotdogs were the staple diet on the terraces, not prawn sandwhiches and fine cheeses. Players with names you could pronounce.

Were things better when teams were not the all powerful money machines they are today.I don’t know, maybe you would like to give me your thoughts on that.

Football songs are normally ghatly things that are aimed at the lowest common denominatoer.